by Eric Vall
“Edony wants to kill the Queen,” I stated. “But, we already suspected that.”
“And?” Valerie chimed.
“I learned how they plan to do it,” I uttered. “But I’m sure once I tell you, all three of you are going to get very angry.”
“Go on, Charles,” Daisy murmured. “There’s nothing we can really do to her now… or at least, yet.”
“That’s what I thought you would say,” I chuckled. “They’ve dropped the idea of creating super-soldiers. They’re going to use something else.”
“Which is?” Rian murmured.
“They’re going to harvest embryos from Edony,” I sighed. “Modify them, pump them full of harmful chemicals and potions, make them into vicious beasts, use an incubator to speed up the gestation period, and then use them against the Queen.”
Silence fell over all three of my women, and I turned to face them and saw that each of them had stopped dead in their tracks. Valerie’s hands covered her mouth in shock, Rian’s eyes widened, and her hands curled into fists, but the most surprising reaction came from Daisy.
“She’s going to… what?” the brunette roared. “Harvest her own embryos? Her own… children?”
“Yes,” I nodded. “That’s what she told me. She couldn’t have lied, the truth serum wouldn’t allow it.”
“That’s… that’s despicable!” the bear-girl roared. “Deplorable! Disgusting! Horrendous! How can such a woman exist?”
Daisy’s round cheeks flamed red, she huffed angrily, stomped forward with curled fists toward a tree at the edge of the drive, and then knit her fingers in front of her chest. The brunette took a single step forward, raised her knitted hands over her head, and then slammed them down toward the trunk of the tree in a fit of blind rage.
“Daisy!” Valerie screamed. “Don’t--”
The bear-girl’s hands stopped within centimeters of the bark of the tree, a blast of air shot through the forest, and two trees behind it lost all of their leaves in the flurry caused by the brunette. The green and orange leafs skittered against the forest floor in the gale caused by the petite bear-girl, and my knees felt weak at the sheer power she held in her tiny body.
“This is Josephine’s manor,” Daisy grumbled under her breath. “I will not cause damage to any of Josephine’s property. I will not cause damage to any of Josephine’s property. I will not--”
I stepped forward, placed a hand on the brunette’s shoulder, turned her toward me, and then took her into my arms. She wasn’t crying, but I could tell that what I’d told her had upset her greatly, and I needed to comfort her at this moment.
“It’s alright,” I murmured. “We’ll figure something out. We’ll do something about it…”
“How?” the gorgeous brunette bleated. “She’s going to hurt her own future children. How can we stop her?”
“We’ll figure it out, okay?” Valerie soothed.
I glanced over my shoulder, Valerie and Rian hurried over and pressed their hands to Daisy’s back to comfort her. Daisy took a long inhale of cool night air, relaxed against me, took a shaky breath, and smiled.
“Thank you, Charles.” The brunette sighed. “I’m just so very stressed and tired…”
“Ready to go home?” the brunette asked. “I know I am.”
Rian and Valerie nodded, took their sister’s hands, and helped her up into the driver’s seat of our carriage. I offered the two women my hands, got them into the back of the cart, and then hopped into the seat next to Daisy.
Then I guided the horses out of the spot, turned around in the drive, and then trundled down the road toward home. We were just coming around the lake, nearing the spot with the lights and singing when Valerie spoke again.
“Oh! Charles!” the feline-woman gasped. “We found out what’s in Josephine’s lake!”
“Really?” I grinned. “What is it?”
“We overheard Josephine talking to another group of aristocrats,” Rian nodded. “She said that she’s been having a tough time with nixes. She also said that she got rid of most of them, but one won’t leave, and it’s really frustrating for her. Apparently, she has a rare moss that grows in this lake, and the nix keeps eating it.”
“Just like Daisy said!” Valerie proudly cried. “You’re so smart, Daisy.”
“Why don’t we stop and take a look?” I offered. “If Josephine is having a problem with them, maybe we should catch it for her, and then take it home?”
“Oooooh!” Valerie cooed. “It could be used for our next sister! It’s a magical beast after all!”
The ash-blonde launched herself out of the back of the wagon, stumbled down the grassy embankment, and reached around her back for the zipper of her dress.
“What are you doing?” Daisy cried. “Don’t get undressed here!”
“No one’s around!” the feline-woman giggled. “Plus, no one can get it from the shore! I’m going to have to wade through the water and catch it! Charles, do you have a cage I can use?”
“Yes,” I chuckled. “Here’s the one we used for the imp. I took it out of the wagon, but put it back later just in case for times like this.”
“Fantastic! Hand it over to me,” the cat-girl cheered.
Valerie struggled out of her dress, slipped off her mask, stood in her underwear, and handed over the clothing to a displeased looking Daisy.
“I suppose I can take care of these.” The brunette took them from her, hung them over the side of the wagon, and then rushed to the edge of the embankment.
“I’ll help!” Rian took the box from me, raced to her feline sister, and then handed over the heavy metal box.
“There it is!” the feline-girl grinned as she pointed at the pond. “Here I go! Rian, hold onto my tail. When I say pull, I want you to yank me back as fast as you can.”
“What if I hurt you?” the black-haired imp-woman murmured. “I don’t want to injure you by pulling too hard.”
“Don’t worry, it won’t,” the ash-blonde assured. “Charles pulls on my tail or my ears sometimes when we have sex, and it doesn’t hurt me. I actually really like it.”
“Well, I hardly think that--” I began to respond.
“Oooh, we’ll have to try that next time, Charles,” Rian giggled. “Go ahead, Valerie. I’ll do as you asked.”
I came to stand next to Daisy at the edge of the embankment, the brunette held her clasped hands to her chest, but kept her golden eyes glued to her sister. Even though Valerie’s tail was constrained, the tip of it twitched with excitement, and her ears laid flat against her head as she concentrated. The feline-woman’s white, lacy panties stuck against her like a second skin as she waded in deeper. She slowed as she neared the luminescence, and hunkered down closer to the water’s surface.
“Alright, here I go,” the ash-blonde whispered. “Let’s hope this works.”
“Please be careful,” the stunning brunette gasped.
Valerie leaped forward with the metal box held tightly over her head, she smashed it against the surface, swept it through the water, and then brought it back up with an enormous splash. The feline-woman held the box close to her chest, peered into the bubbling water, gasped, and then shouted back to Rian.
“Pull!” the cat-girl cried. “I got it!”
In one swift movement, Rian yanked back on Valerie’s tail, the ash-blonde snapped the box shut, held it to her chest, and scooted backward through the water. I opened my mouth to shout congratulations, but a sudden, familiar voice called out to us.
“Charles?” Josephine gasped. “What… What are you doing? What is she doing-- W-Wait… is… is that a tail?”
Chapter Fifteen
“Charles…” Josephine gasped. “What… What is this?”
The blonde aristocrat stood in the drive with the skirt of her ballgown clutched in her fist so it wouldn’t drag across the ground, but her expression was what stopped me in my tracks. Josephine’s orange, wide eyes, wavered in their sockets, and swiveled between Valerie and
me. Her cherry red lips parted, soft sounds whispered up her throat, but not a single, comprehensible word slipped out.
“Jo-Josephine,” I grunted. “I-I…”
I couldn’t explain or come up with a single excuse. How could I? Rian was obviously tugging on Valerie’s very real tail, the feline-woman’s ears twitched, and her oceanic eyes narrowed on the aristocrat standing a few feet away. How hadn’t we noticed her? Not only that, what was she doing out here of all times? It was her masquerade, and she should’ve been inside with her guests.
I had no other choice at the moment, there was no way we could explain all of this away, and I certainly didn’t want to hurt Josephine. If this were any other women other than the heiress, I would’ve attacked her, knocked her out, and thrown her into the back of the wagon.
But Josephine was our friend.
She was the only aristocrat I’d met in my entire life that had sympathy for the ‘brutes’ of our society, but it was more than that, Josephine believed that all of us, men and women, were equals. How could I in good conscience repeat the experiments with a woman who felt those things about my sex? I couldn’t… Even when I forced myself to take a step forward, my hands hung limply at my sides, completely useless.
“Charles!” Daisy roared. “Don’t!”
In one swift movement, I was pulled backward, my feet lifted from the gravel, and I was thrown into the back of the wagon. Everything after that happened in a blur of quick movements. Valerie ripped her dress from the side of the wagon, gripped the side of the cart, flipped inside, turned, and then grabbed Rian by the forearm. The ash-blonde gritted her teeth and pulled the black-haired beauty into the bed with us.
“What?” I grunted.
“Daisy!” the feline-woman screamed. “Go!”
The brunette ripped up the reins, lifted both of her hands into the air, and slapped them down hard against the backs of our horses. The wagon blasted forward with a crash, Daisy glanced over her shoulder at Josephine who still stood in the road, but then turned toward the path ahead of us.
“What are you doing?” I shouted.
“Escaping!” the bear-girl screamed.
“But…” I coughed. “That’s not the best thing to do right now!”
“Do you have a better plan?” Daisy moaned. “We can’t exactly snatch her from her own party! All of the other aristocrats will notice that she’s missing! We have to escape now and figure out a plan later!”
“What if she tells someone?” Rian shrieked. “We should’ve grabbed her.”
“No,” Daisy urged. “I ran through that course of action in my head! That wouldn’t work. We’d be caught and jailed by morning!”
“She won’t tell anyone!” Valerie cried. “It’s Josephine! She likes us! Let’s just go back and explain that this is all just a misunderstanding! Maybe something about a costume malfunction!”
“We can’t do that,” I uttered over the crash of the wagon. “Daisy is right… we have to formulate a plan first. We can’t act on impulse… we’re in a very sticky situation right now.”
“We have to trust Josephine!” the feline-woman pleaded. “We know her. We love her. Come on! She’d never turn her back on us!”
“You don’t know that,” I grunted. “We don’t know that. We may know Josephine, but she’s still an aristocrat, and she could be dangerous. She could expose us…”
The whole world seemed to be tilting, shifting, and spinning around me, and no matter how much I tried to steady myself, it wouldn’t stop. We’d been found out, it had finally happened, my greatest fear had finally come to light, but my only regret was that it had to be Josephine. Why couldn’t it be someone else? Maybe then I could’ve done something about it without remorse or regret, but I knew… something had to be done about her now that she knew.
Josephine may have been our friend, but she was still an aristocrat, not only that but an aristocrat with the power to control our minds, there was no way we could go up against her without knowing what she would do.
I kept my eyes glued to Josephine standing in the middle of the drive, the blonde heiress called out to us, knit her hands together, and then pressed them to the middle of her chest as she shouted out something else. She certainly didn’t look dangerous. In fact, she looked like a lost child, but I knew we couldn’t stop, not when she could still attack us.
“What are we going to do?” Valerie murmured. “What’s going to happen to us?”
“Charles, do you think that Josephine will tell the other aristocrats about what she just saw?” Rian asked. “She doesn’t seem like that type of person, but…”
“We don’t know,” I muttered. “I hate to say it, but we don’t really know Josephine as well as we think we do. The patient we used for Valerie was called a harlot in her memories, but she spewed the same disgusting rhetoric at me before I pulled the switch. We can never know what she truly thinks. We have to formulate a plan first.”
“Let’s… let’s just get home first,” Daisy whispered. “Then we can sit down and discuss our next course of action. A.B. might have some good insights as an outsider…”
All of us fell silent, the wagon rolled forward through the forest, and then down the hill toward the city. Valerie sat in the back of the wagon with her knees pressed to her chest, her head in her hands, and sobbed into her palms.
I scooted closer, wrapped an arm around her shoulders, and pulled the feline-woman to my chest.
I knew that she was upset, she’d wanted to meet Josephine so badly, and things had turned out like this. We didn’t know what the future held, we might have to kill Josephine if she posed a threat to our family, and I knew that hurt the ash-blonde deeply.
“It’s alright,” I soothed. “We’ll figure something out.”
“Charles,” the cat-girl bleated. “We might have to kill her… my first human friend aside from my sisters… It’s just not fair. I don’t want Josephine to die. She’s such a nice lady…”
“I know that, my love,” I calmed. “We’ll figure something out, I promise… Even if we have to turn Josephine into a monster-girl, we’ll do whatever we have to spare her life. I can’t make any promises yet… but I’ll do whatever I can to make sure that Josephine stays happy and healthy.”
“I want Josephine as my sister,” the ash-blonde sobbed. “But… I also like her how she is now. Just as she is.”
“I know, my dear. I do, too,” I agreed. “We’ll do whatever we can, but if Josephine becomes a threat to our family, which she is at this very moment, we may have to take action.”
“I just don’t want to do it,” Valerie murmured. “She’s such a good person as she is now. I don’t want to take that away from her. In some way, the women used in the experiments to create us were bad. They did awful things to men and other people, but Josephine doesn’t deserve to die even if it means we’ll give her a brand new life.”
“You’ve changed your tune so suddenly?” I asked. “Just a few days ago, you were begging me to change her into a monster girl.”
“But that was before I met her in person,” Valerie whimpered. “It was different when I was face to face with her and speaking directly to her. She was so kind and full of life! Knowing everything I read and heard, I know that she believes in the same things as us. I don’t think I could go through with the transformation.”
“I believe we should do whatever Charles thinks is right,” Rian murmured. “If he wants to turn Josephine into a monster-girl, then I agree with him. It’s not that we’re ending Josephine’s life, we’re protecting ours… while getting a new sister. Then she can mate with Charles and make him lots of babies.”
“What do you think, Daisy?” the ash-blonde pleaded. “Do you think we should protect Josephine or turn her into a monster-girl?”
“I don’t want to say right now,” the brunette shouted over the wagon wheels. “There are so many factors going into this, and we don’t know what could happen. Sure, there are benefits to both actions, but
I’d like to go through them before we make a concrete decision. Despite all these things, as Rian said, if Charles chooses to use Josephine in an experiment, I will agree with him. He is our love, and he makes these hard decisions for us.”
“Thank you,” I breathed. “I appreciate it. I will work hard to reach a decision that benefits all of us, Josephine included.”
Everything around us was pitch black, but with the help of her keen senses, Daisy kept us on the dirt path and ripped around the corners of the road like an expert driver. The only sounds surrounding us were the trundle of the wheels beneath us, the clop of the horses’ hooves, and the soft whisper of wind through the woods. I held Valerie close to my side, covered her with her discarded dress, and pressed a tender kiss to the crown of her head.
I would be the one to make the life-changing decision to either sacrifice Josephine or spare her, but it would all depend on what the aristocrat did next. I knew I had the strength and resolve within me to kill her like all of the others, but a part deep down inside of me didn’t want to. Over time, the affection and admiration I had for Josephine had morphed and changed into something completely different, I wouldn’t call it love, no, not yet, but I could imagine myself loving her. The heiress was so easy to care for, not that my monster-women weren’t, but there was something about Josephine that set her apart from all of the other aristocrats.
Despite all these things, all the proof that she could very well turn against us with, I couldn’t believe it deep in my heart. I wanted to believe that she wouldn’t say anything, but right now, I just… couldn’t, we never knew how any of these aristocrats would react.
We raced through the forest, down past the Duchess’ castle, and onto the brick-lined streets of Edenhart. All of the homes and business’ windows were dark by now, and no nobles wandered the road, but that was because all of them were still at Josephine’s manor. I lifted my head, squinted my eyes, and finally spotted our home atop the hill in the distance. I sighed quietly to myself, held the still crying feline-woman to my side, and pressed my lips into a firm line.
